Nosocomial infections, commonly referred to as hospital-acquired infections, are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people each year. Nosocomial infections, are unrelated to a patient's initial hospital admission diagnosis, but are infections acquired during the patients stay or visit to a health care facility. Nosocomial infections due to resistant organisms represent a serious problem. Microbes can acquire resistance to antibiotics, antifungals, and antivirals and as the numbers of resistant organisms increase, the number of new antimicrobial agents to treat them has not kept pace. In fact, community acquired nosocomial infections, especially methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), has increased at an alarming rate. In the United States, it has been estimated that as many as one hospital patient in ten acquires a nosocomial infection, or 2 million patients a year. Studies have shown that at least one third of nosocomial infections are preventable, but the problem of infection persists.
Reports indicate that more than 50% of all nosocomial infections can be directly related to the transmission of harmful bacteria by healthcare workers who have not properly washed their hands before and after each patient contact. Thus, an efficient way to reduce transfer of these organisms from patient-to-patient and to reduce the emergence of resistant organisms is hand washing with soap and water between patient contacts.
Despite the fact that numerous strategies have been attempted to increase healthcare worker compliance to hand washing, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as well as other regulatory agencies recommend hand washing before and after each patient encounter, reports indicate that healthcare workers adhere to hand washing guidelines less than 70% of the time (see O'Boyle, C. A. et al., “Understanding adherence to hand hygiene recommendations: the theory of planned behavior,” Am J Infect Control., 29 (6):352-360 (2001)). Alternatively to, or in addition to, hand washing, barrier protection in the form of gloves provide mechanical and microbial isolation between the patient and health care worker. As is true of hand-washing, there exists poor compliance with glove-based safety protocols.
The high rate of non-compliance to infection control procedures, such as hand washing and wearing a new pair of protective gloves between patients, by healthcare workers is an indication of the failure of the existing approaches to hand washing stations and audit procedures. As such, there is a need for improved mechanisms for infection control and prevention that will increase user compliance and simultaneously decrease the risk or prevalence of transmission of infectious agents from a healthcare worker to a patient or vice versa.